The hardest part of this participation project, for me, was identifying a group to get involved with. A fair amount of searching throughout the semester left me frustrated and jealous of classmates who already had interactions with some of these organizations through work or other projects. I thought LibriVox might be a good fit, since I have experience with audio editing and love the general concept, but I ultimately moved away from that project because of a cumbersome, closed-off sign-up process and a lack of open contribution slots on projects.

Around the midpoint of the semester, I was back to searching for a group when I stumbled upon an interesting member of the WikiMedia community: WikiVoyage. I love showing people around San Antonio (where I live), and I love this concept of a user-driven travel site. There was a page for San Antonio, but it definitely needed a bit of updating. I decided to add information about some public nature preserves where I’ve enjoyed hiking for the last 12 years. This is about as personal as I could get on a travel site – inviting strangers to come hike in these spots I’ve come to love.

This was my first time ever contributing to the WikiMedia community, so I had to create an account – much easier to get involved with WikiMedia than with LibriVox, even if I did have to try 20 different user names to find one still available. As far as content, I chose to focus on the three parks I frequent most often: Friedrich Wilderness Park, Crown Ridge Natural Area, and Eisenhower Park. You can now read about them, see them on an interactive map, and view images on the WikiVoyage page: WikiVoyage San Antonio, under the “Do” heading, subsection “Parks.”

Adding the full array of content for each listing, including map information and photos, actually involved multiple WikiMedia projects:

  1. WikiVoyage (using their template and editing the source file in Wikitext syntax) (Fig. 1);
  2. WikiVoyage GeoMaps, to find the latitude and longitude of each location (Fig. 2); and
  3. WikiMedia Commons, to upload photos and manage image metadata (Fig. 3, Fig. 4).

I was surprised at how many feelings I encountered throughout the process. For instance, I was really nervous to make my first edit – as though I was going to break something. “Could I delete my entry if I made a mistake, and why wasn’t this clear in the user interface?” I took the plunge, made my first mistake, and deleted my first entry. The next big feeling came when someone edited my entry. They changed the header from “Natural Areas” to “Parks” (Fig. 5). I ultimately decided it was a minor thing best left alone, but I also felt inhibited about engaging with a random stranger about which heading might be more appropriate. More than that, though, I found myself feeling a little territorial about the content I added, and this experience forced me to confront whether I like that aspect of my personality.

This particular project provided fairly direct connections to the Insights Readings from the semester:

In the end, my contribution to WikiVoyage was a rewarding experience. I felt like I’d done something meaningful and personal, even if that “something” was relatively small. It was my first time contributing to any of the WikiMedia communities, and that involved working with Wikitext in the source file, locating latitude and longitude via GeoMaps, and uploading photos to WikiMedia Commons. I got to play “virtual tour guide” and share information about some places that are meaningful to me. I also was forced to be a little introspective about feelings that came up during the experience. And, perhaps most important to my academic understanding of open-source organizations, this experience helped to personalize the scholarly writings we’ve discussed throughout the semester.

Figure 1. Adding content using WikiVoyage template and editing the source file using Wikitext syntax. Figure 1

Figure 2. Using WikiVoyage’s GeoMap system to identify the latitude and longitude of the parks.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Figure 3. Uploading photos to WikiMedia Commons and employing the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 license. Figure 3

Figure 4. Completing the metadata for the uploaded photos. Figure 4. Completing the metadata for the uploaded photos.

Figure 5. Edits made to the content I uploaded by another user of the site. Figure 5

References:

  1. Baker, M.J., Détienne, F., Barcellini, F. (2017). Argumentation and Conflict Management in Online Epistemic Communities: A Narrative Approach to Wikipedia Debates. In: Arcidiacono F., Bova A. (eds) Interpersonal Argumentation in Educational and Professional Contexts. Springer, Cham. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59084-4_7

  2. Benkler, Y. (2016). “Peer Production and Cooperation.” Handbook on the Economics of the Internet. Ed.s Bauer & Latzer.

  3. Butler, B., Joyce, E., Pike, J. (2008). Don’t look now, but we’ve created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1101-1110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357227

  4. Crowston, K., & Fagnot, I. (2018). Stages of motivation for contributing user-generated content: A theory and empirical test. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 109, 89–101.

  5. Expectancy Theory (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_theory

  6. Chapter 8 “Managing Participants” from from Fogel, K. (2018) “Producing OSS: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” https://producingoss.com/en/index.html

  7. Levine, S. S., & Prietula, M. J. (2013). Open Collaboration for Innovation: Principles and Performance. Organization Science, 25(5), 1414–1433.

  8. Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

  9. Malone, T. W., & Crowston, K. (1994). The interdisciplinary theory of coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87–119.

  10. Nov, O. (2007). What motivates Wikipedians? Communications of the ACM, 50(11), ACM New York, NY, USA.

  11. Millington, R. Types of online communities. https://www.feverbee.com/types-of-community-and-activity-within-the-community/

  12. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67.

  13. Shah, S. K. (2006). Motivation, governance, and the viability of hybrid forms in open source software development. Management Science, 52(7), 1000–1014.

  14. Vroom, V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. New York: John Wiley & Sons.